The italics are mine, but the words are not: Alfred North Whitehead said it, from the scientific point of view. And what are the "developments of natural science" of which he speaks? Let Dr. Einstein tell us, in his own succinct way: "It therefore appears unavoidable that physical reality must be described in terms of continuous functions in space." Italics mine.
And consider this one, from Heisenberg: "The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, into which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole."
Whitehead again: "In the place of the Aristotelian notion of the procession of forms, [the new physics] has substituted the notion of the forms of process."
Still unconvinced? Try this, from Max Planck: "[In field theory] each individual particle of the system ... exists simultaneously in every part of the space occupied by the system. This simultaneous existence applies not merely to the field of force with which it is surrounded, but also its mass and its charge. We are (therefore) compelled to give up the earlier essential meaning of [the particle concept]."
Finally, from Dr. Einstein again: "[Before field theory] people conceived of physical reality—insofar as it is supposed to represent events in nature—as material points, whose changes consist exclusively of motions. [With field theory] they conceived physical reality as represented by continuous fields, not mechanically explicable. This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and fruitful one that has come to physics since Newton." My italics.
What this means, to me and to you, is that we should not rely entirely upon the commonsense in our attempts to define reality for ourselves.
The esteemed gentlemen quoted above are discussing the Kingdom of Nonsense—a reality composed of electrical fields and little else, until you add mind to it. Reality is a process. This process, in which we are immersed, is also immersed in us, always involves us—whether or not we are able to observe and/or comprehend the involvement. The degree to which we are allowed to observe is dictated finally by the way our brains are wired; the degree to which we allow ourselves to observe, within the natural limitations of the brain, is largely determined by the individual RQ.
What do you wish to see? Who said to you, "Look and you shall see. Knock and it shall be opened. Ask and it shall be given." A rather famous mystic said it, and he was talking about reality too.
What is your RQ? What are you prepared to see? What are you willing to admit into your reality model?
Are you prepared to accept the universe that is revealed to us by the very high RQ minds of Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Jesus, Gautama, Rhine, and a field army of parapsychologists? It is a world where past, present, and future exist together without superficial delineation, where matter and energy and mind are all different names for the same substance, where space and time and in and out and up and down and far and near are all describing the same place at the same time, where life and death are synonomous with being and where being itself is mere process.
Are you ready for that?
If not, then you probably will not be comfortable with my story. I think you should put it down for now. Because we are now firmly seated in the Kingdom of Nonsense.
Chapter Eleven: Mirror, Mirror
Alison arrived at a little after seven o'clock, bearing fresh doughnuts from a nearby bakery. We consumed a pot of coffee and the entire sack of doughnuts while exchanging experiences of the night. I said nothing about the visit at Cochran's home but held back nothing else. The lady was understandably shaken by her encounter with the living dead. I felt I owed her total honesty in that connection, and I gave it to her—but not necessarily blow by blow. Some things, after all, are sacred—even as between a man and his ghost. Her story was essentially as she'd given it to me on the telephone; there was nothing to add to that except her own subjective reactions to the event. It had scared the hell out of her, jarred her professional wisdom, upset her framework of reality. I could sympathize with all that; I'd been through it enough for myself. This was not a first time for me, but don't get the idea that I was all cool and objective over the incidents. I still had the wriggles too. And don't get the idea that I was in a position to explain all this to Alison. I was most certainly not. I would have been thrilled to have someone to explain it to me.
But I was the more experienced in bizarre events. As she said, this was more my sort of thing.
Just so you'll understand where I was coming from, though, please be advised that a "psychic" is no better equipped to deal with this stuff than anyone else. I've never met a psychic yet who could pass an impromptu quiz on quantum physics. Just because we "see" something doesn't mean that we necessarily understand what we see or how we saw it.
But please understand also that I was trying to reassure a badly shaken psychologist and trying to share with her the admittedly limited understanding I had of the phenomenon.
Alison asked me, "Have you ever experienced dissociative phenomena? I mean, personally—have you experienced it?"
I admitted that I had. "In trance, yeah. I was playing around with self-hypnosis a few years ago. Did a PH (posthypnotic suggestion) trick with a kangaroo, took him around with me everywhere for a couple of weeks."
She said, "But that would be simply a visual hallucination."
I replied, "No, Rudy was more than that. He was present in all the sensory dimensions. He was very real. Only to me, of course. Sort of like Jimmy Stewart with Harvey."
She was thinking about that. "But I meant ... dissociative ..."
I knew what she meant. Dissociative experience is when a piece of your personality breaks away from the whole and "dissociates" itself from the rest of you. A hallucination, of course, which utilizes your own consciousness is, in a manner of speaking, a "piece" of you. A "split personality" is defined this way. I told Alison, "Rudy became dissociative. I had to consult another hypnotist to get rid of him. Became a real problem. Started showing up totally independent of the PH."
'This ... kangaroo ... evidenced personality, then."
"Sure did. Kept trying to involve me in nutty intrigues."
The pretty brow was knit in thought. "Okay, so ... how would you compare your experience with Rudy and the experience with Jane Doe?"
"Already tried that," I said. "Doesn't wash. None of—"
"No, no," she said quickly. "I wasn't trying— That would be even more farfetched than— We both, after all, experienced her. We didn't both ..."
"Neither of us dissociated," I assured her.
"Well, what I was going for... what I was trying ... say, just for argument, that the personality does survive death and that Jane's somehow managed to—what do they do, hover?—she stayed close, somehow, and she telepathically stimulated our minds to ... well, to hallucinate."
I said, "That doesn't wash, either."
"Why not?"
I sighed and reminded her of the towel. Then I produced the Polaroids I'd taken of Jane. "And how would you explain these?"
She said, "Yeah, yeah," in hushed excitement, tapped one of the photos with a nervous finger, added, "Same towel, that's it. God, this just blows my mind, Ashton."
I said, "There's more," and took her into my office.
"Message from Jane," I explained, and handed over the printouts from the Tandy's graphics program. There were three sets. "The first set is mine. My interpretation of the images from Jane's mind while she was dying. Second set is just doodling. Jane was here and I was showing her how it works, inviting her to communicate. She passed. I found the third set on the computer this morning, after you called me."
That third set was very heavy stuff. If someone had said to me, "Draw me a map of the subconscious mind," I might have produced something like that, if I had the imagination and talent to do it. I have neither, so knew very well that this was not my stuff, from whatever level of consciousness. It was a riot of images, much of it very distorted spatially, like images on a TV screen when the vertical and hor
izontal controls are messed up. Numbers appeared here and there, distorted faces, unrecognizable shapes and geometric patterns all jumbled together in a dimensionality that showed no respect whatever for space-time conventions. There were several feet of this, at an eight-and-a-half-inch width, all appearing as a single "painting" without borders or breaks.
It awed Alison, as it had me. I left her with it, to puzzle over on her own without distraction while I showered and got dressed. She appeared behind me in my bathroom mirror while I was shaving, held up the graphic, and pointed to a particular design as she inquired, "Did you get the significance of this?"
I stared at the image in my mirror. It all looked different, in reverse image. For some reason the spatiality seemed somehow more congruent. The particular design at question was a strange three-dimensional cube colored solidly except for tiny "unpainted" background areas that now leapt out at me as small numerals.
I told Alison, "Looks like a number buried within a cube, doesn't it?"
She replied, "Yes. And I've spotted four of them scattered about the mural. They—"
I growled, "Well, dammit!"
"What?"
"Mural! You didn't mean—you meant ...!"
Alison was affected by my excitement. "Well, like a mural, some murals. I know, a mural is a picture painted on a wall. I meant ..."
"Pictograph!" I nearly yelled. “It's a hieroglyphic, dammit! Pictures representing an idea. It's the most primitive form of writing!”
Alison seemed confused but still affected by my excitement. "Like the Etruscans? Early Egyptians? That kind of—?"
I said, "Sure. Straight out of the right brain. That's the way they did it. The writing matched the nonverbal symbols, not the sounds of the spoken language. It was fucking mind-to-mind communication!"
"I never heard it put that way before," Alison said uncertainly.
"Neither did I," I admitted. "But I'll bet it's true. And I'll bet Jane handled it the same way."
I was dying to get my hands on that graphic, but my hands were wet and I didn't want to smudge anything. Of course, the whole thing was stored in computer memory and I could run off all the copies I wanted, but my head was not settled enough to think of that. I told Alison, "Let me get this lather off my face and we'll have a go at that message from beyond. Do me a favor while I'm finishing up here. Take a mirror off the wall—the little hall mirror will do fine. Set it up on my desk in such a way that we can study this graph in mirror image."
She said, "Okay. But I came in here to tell you ..." She again found her area of interest on the graphic and again pointed it out to me. "I believe this is a highway sign."
I shot it a closely focused look. "You mean a—?"
"A route marker. I believe the numerals are one-five- zero. It is repeated several times."
“Highway 150?”
"Yes. I know it well. Goes through my favorite place in all the world. Ojai."
I said, "That's—hell, that's..."
"In the hills above Ventura, yes."
My excitement was growing. "What's his name, uh ...?"
"Krishnamurti."
"That's the one! He has a place there, a retreat or—"
"Yes, I've been there," she told me. "I even met Krishnamurti, shortly before he died."
Alison went on telling me about her meeting with the respected mystic, but I really was not listening to her now. My head was starting to burst with a swirl of kaleidoscoping visual patterns, and I knew that I was hooked on this case, locked into it for good or for bad.
Worse, it seemed that Jane Doe was locked onto me. Mind to mind, as it were. And she was painting like crazy in my right cerebral hemisphere.
Chapter Twelve: Of Shapes and Patterns
Alison called in and arranged for someone to cover for her at the hospital for the day. We worked on Jane's graphic until ten o'clock. One of the things we discovered was that the "ideas" presented in this strange form of writing were not only rendered in reverse image but were also in a sort of, reverse contrast, if that makes any sense—somewhat like a photo negative. I tried some computer enhancement on selected trial areas of the graph and that helped a bit, but it was damned slow going.
The large problem was that there was no linear sense of movement in the "scenes," if you can call them that. There was no logic to the spatial separation of events. Like, if you take a comic strip and cut it up into frames, then remove the borders from the frames and mix them all together without the speech balloons into a disorganized montage, it would be a bit difficult to recapture the cartoonist's original idea. Then if you add to that montage some dream sequences or flashbacks or whatever, the picture really gets jumbled.
I felt that I was working with something of that nature.
Add to that, then, the problem I was having with Jane in real time. I kept getting these color bursts in the head, which I took to be continuing communication from wherever, and it was very distracting.
I decided that the best way to tackle the job, from the crypto-analytical point of view, would be to assign each element of the montage a computer key, then try some reassemblies with a random-number generator and look for correspondences, but I really did not want to put that kind of time into the puzzle at this point.
You see, certain elements had emerged from the jumble—recognizable elements—and I was experiencing a strong compulsion to pursue those elements. Like, faces in the crowd. Oh, yes. Many faces were buried in that kaleidoscope of images. Mine was there. Alison's was. Jim Cochran was there. All entirely recognizable when the contrasts were worked out. There was an interesting group portrait in there too. Sort of a family shot. Starring Jim and Georgia Cochran and Vicky Victoria.
Alison, of course, had never had occasion to meet Cochran's family. She was positive that Jane Doe had never seen them, either. And she agreed with me that Vicky looked an awful lot like a young Jane Doe, even in this computer-graphics rendering.
So we elected to leave the crypto-analysis for a more leisurely moment, and we sallied forth into the real world of space and real time. I have to say, though, that it took me a few minutes to reorient to that world. It all seemed different now, somehow. Shapes and patterns took on new meanings, the depth perception was just a bit off, colors seemed more vivid. Time and motion seemed a bit out of whack, too, not entirely synchronized in the usual manner. I asked Alison if she was experiencing the same problem, but she apparently was not because she did not seem to understand the question.
At any rate, I did not immediately trust myself behind the wheel of a car. I also did not trust another driver behind the wheel of my Maserati. So I stalled a little, walked around the car several times checking the tires and bumpers and lights and so forth until the commonsense reality was back in place in my head. Then we took off for Hollywood, both of us in the Maserati.
I had a copy of the computer graphics sealed in a manila envelope as my "passport" into the Cochran household. I did not expect that Jim would be home; hoped that he would not. It was Vicky Victoria that I was interested in. I was hoping for a few minutes alone with her. And I wanted Alison to see her in the flesh.
It worked out just fine. The Cochran home is in the Hollywood hills, up by the reservoir. Nice place. The homes in this area don't look all that great from the street side because the exposure is to the rear; the yard is back there, the view is back there, therefore the actual "front" of the house is back there. You don't see a lot from the street approach. The lots are rather narrow, the houses therefore closely side by side. But half of Jim's lot was terraced hillside. He was a pretty good handyman, so he did a lot of improvements on his own. Built his own swimming pool and spa, had a nice little play area for the kids on the terrace.
Georgia was working in a small flower garden back there. A little boy of about eight answered our ring and took us through. He was "Manuel-Manuel"—Manuel being Spanish for Immanuel, which means "God is with us." He told us that himself, in transit from the front door to the back. This li
ttle boy was Latino. He had a withered left arm and walked with a sort of crabbing gait, the result of an also less-than-whole left leg.
I had told Alison that the children were adopted, to properly prepare her for the meeting. She caught my eye as we followed along behind the slow but enthusiastic lead of Manuel-Manuel and whispered to me, "These are good people."
I nodded silent agreement with that. It does take, I'm sure, a somewhat different "commonsense notion" of values to adopt a physically handicapped child. I mean, when it happens to you with your own, then I guess you just swallow hard and try to make the best of a heartbreaking situation. But to take on someone else's heartbreak ... well, yes, that presupposed a rather uncommon approach to the value system. And I guess I knew then why I had instantly liked Georgia Cochran, why I'd always had a special feeling for her husband too.
I introduced the women without going into Alison's background, and I lied a little as to the nature of our visit. I do that sometimes when a little lie seems appropriate. I placed the manila envelope on a patio table and explained that we were passing nearby the neighborhood, decided to leave the package for Jim rather than trying to track him down at work.
Georgia seemed to buy that, smiled at Alison, said, "Oh, yes, I recognize the name now. You're the psychologist for ... that poor girl."
She insisted on refreshing us. We decided on iced tea, and Georgia went inside to attend to that.
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